This invention relates to the pounding equipment of a coke oven plant using coal compacted by punners. In particular, it relates to a mechanism for retaining such punners in raised position.
Certain coke oven plants make use of a coking coal that is first compacted. This compacting is effected by pounding the coal in a pounding box with pounding members known as punners until it resembles a cake which is then pushed into an oven chamber for coking. The transference of the cake into the oven chamber after the coal has been compacted by pounding requires that the punners of the pounding box be retained in raised position after they have been lifted out of the pounding box, and are not lowered again until the pounding box is ready for the next compaction cycle.
The retention of the punners in raised position at the end of a compaction cycle was heretofore effected by manually driving a wedge against each of the punner rods. This took a good deal of time, particularly when the pounding box was associated with a large number of punners. Moreover, such wedges are likely to loosen during the period for which the punners should be kept raised, since the manual driving of a wedge is not a strictly controlled operation and its results are sometimes unsatisfactory due to human failings. On the other hand, driving wedges by hand also often leads to the punner rods being damaged in the region where the wedges are set. The result is an undesirable loss of time due to the need to effect repairs and the inactivation of the pounding box for considerable periods.